


A Variety of Unfinished SCP Fics Rotting In My Writing Program

by thefriendlyvandal



Category: SCP Foundation
Genre: M/M, theres a lot going on here, uhhhhh this is a MESS lmao holy shit lol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-01-23 02:52:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18540817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefriendlyvandal/pseuds/thefriendlyvandal
Summary: hey everybody welcome to my hell hole. this is a good few scp angst things that have been rotting in my writing program for like......months, some of them a little over a year. maybe ill finish a couple of them some day who knows but heres this i guessWARNING: EVERYTHING IN HERE IS OLD, UNFINISHED, CHAOTIC, AND WEIRDLY CHARACTERIZED IN PLACESUPDATE 9/21/2019: sooo since i recently left scp i have a ton of old scenes lying around that i'm now definitely not gonna use, so i might be slowly sifting through and posting them here as time goes on.





	1. Fog [Draven/James]

James wasn’t sure how he didn’t notice his appearance post-amnesiac procedure sooner, because even with the haze of drugs and bandages on his head it was pretty damn obvious he looked like shit.

Leaning on the sink in the early morning, blinking behind the thick frames of his glasses, James carefully touched the fuzz left behind from when they shaved his head, the six burned circles where they placed the electrodes, little scabs where they hooked into his scalp. Bandages under his shirt where whatever he was against had hurt him. Bites and burns he didn’t recognize. Bags under his eyes.

He touched his head again, lightly, making sure it was real. He did have hair before they assigned him, right? Light brown and shaggy? No little burns or medical hooks or drainage holes to reduce the swelling? He did, he remembers brushing it, and then kissing Draven goodbye, getting on a plane--

\--and then the hospital four months later.

“...Draven?” called James absentmindedly. He was wearing his own clothes- sweatpants and a t-shirt- but they hung on his frame, loose fitted over layers of gauze.

“Yeah?” He heard his partner’s light tenor from the other room, filled with the soft concern that it had in the past few days since James started slowly coming around. He wasn’t sure how he felt about being babied, but he felt physically weak, rough around the edges, forgetful, thoughts coming slow and sluggish. It wasn’t like he had much of a choice.

“...Can you come here for a minute?” said James, leaning on the sink a little bit heavier. His boyfriend appears in the bathroom door just as he’s rubbing his bare scalp again, perplexed.

“Hey," said Draven. “You okay?”

James tilted his head to the side in the mirror and carefully brushed his fingers across the bandages covering the numb part of his head, the tiny hole right behind his left ear where they’d put the wiring. He doesn't feel his own fingers as he does. Draven watched him with sympathy in his eyes, realizing what he just walked into. James brought his finger down from behind his ear to the purple bruises covering his collarbone, trancelike, distant.

“...James?” The voice is soft, sympathetic. James swallows sharply, feeling nauseous. “James-”

“-I _did_ have hair, didn’t I?” He croaks, and his boyfriend joins him at the sink. He looks so damn small next to Draven now, Draven with his lean task force muscles and Draven with his aftershave and Draven with his arms hugged around James’ waist, avoiding the bandaged gashes there, Draven that had stood outside the amnestic treatment room door after his last procedure, waiting there with his jacket over one arm to wrap around his thin, shaky body, talking to the doctor, it went well, everything went well, all the memories removed, minor seizures are normal for a couple weeks but will taper off, medication, sleep, all about James with his pale skin and then-bald head and medical bracelet around one wrist proclaiming him at risk for a fall, he can’t help but feel saved, like something terrible happened, like something unspeakable happened, something that makes him feel sick when he sees his bare wounds and something that makes him bury his face into Draven’s chest and let him hold him tight, and now in the bathroom he says “Yes, babe, you had hair. They had to shave it for the amnestics, remember?”.

* * *

 

“W-what’s your name again?”

He knows the man who brought him home, who wrapped him in a blanket and gave him a cup of water on the couch. He’s seen him crying and laughing, at his best and at his worst; his heart tugs when he looks at him. He feels familiar, from his voice down to his aftershave. Safe. Belonging.

“Draven,” says the man, collapsing into the couch cushions next to him. “I’m your boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend,” James repeats. Everything feels slow, sluggish, a bit overwhelming.

“Yeah," says Draven, his boyfriend, with a head of dark fluffy curls that he could play with in the mornings and the faint smell of gunpowder sticking to his skin. He liked black coffee and books, books, books, books about reality and books about metaphysics and books about old type green rituals, paperbacks left open on his chest as he sleeps, action films and documentaries, driving with the windows down, classic rock music on cassettes that used to be his father’s.

And James. He loves James.

James takes a couple gulps of the tap water in his hands sleepily rubs one eye. His head pounds, but it doesn’t hurt.

“...How many times did you say I had this done?”

“This was your last treatment,” says Draven. “And your seventh round of it.”

“...Seventh…”

Draven smiles at him lightly. “They said that the last one would be the hardest.”

James gives him a sleepy nod in reply, even though he had no idea under what circumstances they might have said anything.

* * *

 

It was flashing.

There was flashing, flashing, flashing of colors and words and things he should have forgotten. James feels overwhelmed, like every nerve in his body is functioning on high input, like being submersed in water.

“James.”

Is that my name?

“James.”

His mouth feels like cotton, his head bangs, his vision spins, his ears are ringing, and there’s the Man, the man that helps him and loves him and is safe, the man with his palm pressed to his forehead as he’s laying on the carpeting of their bedroom. Everything is muddled and swimming in and out, flashes of color screaming into his vision. He opens his mouth, then closes it; the words won’t come.

“James," says the curly haired man lovingly as James’ chest heaves, ribcage on carpeting, sweat rolling in beads down his face. “Did you hit your head? Are you okay?”

The words still won’t come, but they don’t need to come, because now the man is checking his bald scalp for marks, for cuts or bruises that shouldn’t be there, for any indication that he might have hurt himself when he fell.

“It doesn’t look like it," he finishes his own thought. James tries to respond; “...What?” he mumbles. “Hey-”

“You had a seizure.”

The world feels strange, abstract, numb. Every bone in his body shutters and aches when the man takes him in his arms and lays him in bed and before the man can pull the blankets up, dark hair and aftershave and index fingers bruised from jamming guns in target practice, James moves his mouth to make words and they come out in a jumble instead, not in the correct order, not in the correct way. The man tells him to hush, but James is insistent.

“Name?” He blurts out, fumbling, head buzzing with stimulation. “Na--”

“--Don’t work yourself up, okay? You’re gonna hurt--”

James grabs his arm and holds it tight. There are raindrops on the window and tears in his eyes; he feels so helpless, so weak, so fucking frustrated, why can’t I remember your name?

“No. Hey.” The man’s voice softens suddenly. “Hey. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”

“Name?” Squeaks out James. The man is so much more. “Please?”

“...Draven,” says the man, outlined in the muted sunlight from the window. He goes to play with James’ hair out of habit before stroking his cheek instead. His boyfriend has no hair right now. “I’m your boyfriend, remember?”

“Draven," breathes James. That was right. He knew that, he knew that. James grips Draven’s arm tighter. “Draven.”

“That’s right. I’ve got you.” Draven’s fumbling on the nightstand now, and in the darkness he can make out the outline of a premeasured syringe, the click of the cap coming off, the prick of it in his upper bicep. James almost launches into a panic before the syringe exits his skin just as quickly as it slid in; it’s discarded on the nightstand with the skill of someone who’s been doing this for the better part of a month and has seen their partner in the throes of a seizure more than once. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

The rain is hazy outside. The light is hazy inside. James’ thoughts are hazy and his vision blurs when his eyes fill with more tears, more vigorously now; he curls up in a fetal position when Draven brings the mismatched blankets up around his shoulders. His sobs are quiet and tired, and his partner’s coos of comfort match his tone. James has seen a million soft, hazy things in recent months, and he fears that he may never have everything in focus ever again, or see things with too much focus, like before, or his head will hurt and he will seize, or not be able to read, jumbled thoughts and weary eyes the man he can’t always remember kisses his forehead and rubs his back and promises him with all his heart that he will allow nothing to harm him, but it isn’t the harm itself that scares James.

It is the inability to face it that does.

* * *

 

When Draven’s father comes to visit, James is sleeping with tear streaks on his face in their bed. The elder Kondraki pushes his thick glasses up the bridge of his nose and crosses his arms against his green Columbia jacket and sighs as he stands in their kitchen, mug of coffee in hand; Draven sits on the counter across from him. It’s far in the night, but he needed the company and his father has no objections to early morning outings in the rain.

Not to mention, he’s seen this many times before.

Draven doesn’t object when Benjamin chases down the coffee with something from a silver flask. He doesn’t have the energy to worry over two people right now.

“If you keep worrying over these fits,” says his father gruffly, leaning back on the countertop, “you’re gonna make yourself sick, kid. They’re normal with this kind of procedure.”

Draven stares into his coffee wearily. “Dad, I just…” He puts the cup aside and rubs his eyes with a sigh. “...I know that they’re normal. I just hate seeing him like this, you know?”

His father looks at him with soft sympathy; he isn’t sure if he feels comforted or irritated. “I know you’re worried, Draven. It’ll pass. You gotta believe it’ll pass.”

“Dad.” Draven runs his hand through his hair. “He doesn’t remember my name half the time. I just...dad, what if he--”

“--doesn’t get better?” finishes his father. Draven swallows sharply, but receives a nod in reply. “He’ll get better, kiddo. These things don’t happen overnight. The whole procedure overworks your brain, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Says Draven.

“And his brain is still adjusting," says Ben.

“I know," says Draven, but the words catch a little in his throat. It does not go unnoticed by his father.

“Kid.”

He squeezes his eyes shut to cry, and his dad is around him, smelling like cigarette smoke and ink. Draven feels like a child in his father’s arms, but he hugs him back, tightly, because what would he do if he lost James? What would he do if something happened to him? What would he do?

His father pulls him at arms length, hands on either of his son’s shoulders, and looks him in the eye.

“He’s gonna be okay, yeah?”

Draven nods. "Yeah.”

“And he’s gonna get better, because he’s got you looking after him, yeah?”

“Y-yeah.”

“And the doctors have done this procedure a million times before.”

“That’s right.”

“And he’s better than he was.”

Draven winces at that. He didn’t like to think about the month James had been home before getting treatment; when he’d come out of it like a shell of his former self. He’d been jaded when awake and terrified when asleep. Night sweats giving way to low grade fevers in the mornings. Barely eating. Constantly exhausted. Not letting Draven touch him.

He’d said some hurtful things to him, some very hurtful things that had come out of nowhere and left as soon as they came; they’d been directed at him and always had implied that Draven wasn’t who he said he was, that he was lying, that he was a malicious entity out to get him. Nights with James locked in the bathroom screaming at Draven to go away. Nights where he’d watched his partner spiral into paranoia so severe he’d slept on the couch and let him lock the bedroom door between them just to make his partner feel safe enough to rest. And then the night with the knife.

His father had been very worried after the knife.

“Yeah,” he said.

“No more of that?”

Draven shook his head _no._ There hadn’t been anymore of it. James was back to his old self, and Draven had spent the few weeks following his procedures reminding him of his name and feeding him a constant stream of broth and gatorade whenever the pain in his head subsided enough for him to be halfway functional. Draven wasn’t sure, in the long run, if he would rather have another night with James thinking he was dangerous or another night with James in the throes of a severe migraine. Hearing him sneer a string of insults in his direction, or seeing him listless and pale in their bed, occasionally whimpering in pain. He didn’t like either of them, but at least with the latter he could provide some sort of comfort; a cold compress, drawing the shades closed, keeping his surroundings as dark and quiet as possible. And James had let him touch him, then, too; during one of his worst he’d rubbed circles on his upper back, held his hand, rubbed his shoulders. After the procedure, there was a time when the only way to get James to sleep was to touch him; before, there was a time when the only way to get James to sleep was to isolate him.

His father smiled. James slept.

Things were going to be okay.

* * *

 

“I _threw up on you?!_ ” cries James in the car when they go out to breakfast at a local cafe two months after his procedure, when his hair is half an inch long and hangs a little over the electrode marks.  
  
” _Twice!_ ” laughs Draven. It hadn’t been funny when it happened, of course, when James was too sick to process even who had been holding him in the first place, or even that he was about to vomit after several days of miserable nausea and muddled pain. Draven had felt so awful for him at the time that it hadn’t mattered.

“That’s so  _embarrassing!_ ” James laments loudly in the passenger seat of his green Subaru, the one that he isn’t allowed to drive for another four months. Draven is grinning. His partner’s face is bright red.

“Well, I mean, to be fair, it wasn’t like you’d had a ton of solid food, so really it was more of a frothy-”

“- _You don’t need to apprise me of the consistency!”_ says James in their usual healthy exasperated academic tone. His full vocabulary was coming back. Draven hadn’t been aware of how much he’d missed the word _apprise_ in the way James said it until now.


	2. Yom Kippur [Draven and Ben and it's sad and fatherly]

It’s Yom Kippur and although Kondraki hasn’t fasted in decades, he does this time.

He doesn’t like how it looks, the hospital- never really has- but something about seeing his son’s vital signs beeping incessantly on a machine next to the bed he’s sprawled in makes his skin crawl. It’s a sound thats both hypnotizing and grating; in the previous few days, he’s heard it in his dreams like a morbid march to his child’s grave.

The doctors had shown them the lung on the x-rays, and for Kondraki in his jeans and dirty button up and alcohol stench in that sterile ward seeing the x-rays had made him feel incredibly small and even more incredibly stupid. _Can’t you just fix those shattered bones? Replace the lung that’s smashed to hell? Stich up all the gashes, heal all the bruises, give him back the weight he’s lost? Can’t you just fix my boy?_ And of course they couldn’t. He didn’t know what he’d expected them to do, actually. He’d known from the first time that he’d seen him that it was bad; it didn’t take a medical degree to know that. And he’d known that there was a reason that they couldn’t fix him any more than they’d already tried; he had no reason to think that they’d done anything short of everything that they could. So there really wasn’t any reason for him to keep asking why they were giving him so much blood, or why he was so damn weak. He knew. He’d seen the x-rays.

“…Oh,” says Draven softly, suddenly, voice muffled by the oxygen mask, “I’m not sure.”

He says it like he’s talking to someone beyond Ben’s range of vision. It’s not really a distressed intonation more than it sounds slightly concerned, or even inconvenienced. _Oh, I’m not sure,_ just like he’s talking on the phone. Ben runs one hand through his thick dark curls, half expecting to feel a fever, but his skin is cool and clammy and his eyes are closed. Dreaming, maybe. He hoped he was dreaming.

“You’re okay, kiddo,” He says, mostly for himself. His son’s brows are furrowed. There are thin lines of concern across his pale features.

“Don’t do that,” Draven says to no one. He slurs it out forcefully, like he’s trying to break through the haze of sleep and painkillers. Kondraki’s hand hesitates, because in another time and place this would have meant for him to stop touching his hair, but after a moment it becomes clear that it’s not directed at him at all, but some dream entity. Maybe even the thing that had murdered the rest of his squad and left him to die for two weeks in a crumbled basement. _Don’t do that_ \- so subdued, Kondraki thinks. He’d always been a ‘talk now, shoot later’ kind of kid. It was a quality that must have come from his mother.

They’d let Kondraki bring a blanket from his bed at home; he’d shuffled around in his son’s room for a few minutes in solemn silence before choosing the multicolored quilt folded over the end of the bed, the one that his mother had given to him when he was ten. She was dead now, too; died in the same breach, not that he was rushing to break the news to Draven in his current condition. The quilt covers some of the more concerning stitches and bandages and tubes and is the only shit in the room that isn’t a shade of white or grey. It rises and falls with his son’s labored breaths and makes him feel incredibly, horribly numb, and he isn’t sure if it’s grief or terror because that’s how they’d put it, _bring something from home, make him comfortable_.

Make him comfortable. He loathed that phrase because he knew exactly what it meant.

_Sure, I’ll make my son more comfortable on his deathbed with a quilt from his dead mom. That’s totally fine, just making him more acquainted with the surroundings, you know._

“I’m sorry,” says Draven now. His voice is husky with tears, and again Ben isn’t sure if he’s trying to talk to him or to something in his dreams.

“It’s okay,” whispers Ben.

There is nothing left in his body to make him fight.

 

 


	3. Whatever the fuck this is [Ben Kondraki/Clef]

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s an ear thermometer?”

“Why the fuck do you have an ear thermometer?”

“Because there was a time in my life where I had a small child. And then I just forgot to get a normal one.”

“Ben,” Clef says, turning the instrument over in his hands, “I…I think this is literally an infant thermometer. Have you guys been using an infant thermometer-”

“You come into _my_ home, under _my_ roof, and you judge _my_ thermometer? The absolute audacity, Alto. The scrutiny. And to think, from my own lover!” Kondraki says. Alto admires this about him, his capacity for comedic melodrama. “You come to me and betray me! On my _deathbed_ , no less! I should have suspected you all along.” He ends the short monolog with a raspy cough.

“Yeah, yeah,” Clef mumbles, coaxing the 20+ year old digital thermometer to life. “Keep your head still for a second.”

“You could sooner divert a river from its course than deny me-” Ben starts again before cutting off into a cough, sharp and abrupt. This time, he keeps coughing. When the fit extends past a few seconds, Alto stops trying to decipher the polish labelling on the aging thermometer and instead watches with a sinking feeling in his chest. He’s almost gasping for breath. The coughing has a painful, wracking appearance to it that intensifies when the fit gains momentum. He thinks about him coming home soaking wet the night before; about how little sleep he’s gotten, about the stress he’s been under. Why were they taking his temperature to begin with? They both knew he’d been running a fever. They both knew he was run down, that he’d been running down for a while now. The only question was if the fever was high enough for a trip to medical for an exam, which judging by how his cough was waking him up at night, he probably needed regardless.

“If Draven was still a kid, and he had a cough like that, would you take him to medical?”

 

* * *

 

“Ben?”

“Yeah?”

“Your baby thermometer says you’re dead.”

“Well it’s about goddamn time.”

 

* * *

 

 

Ben is in a hazy, fitful kind of sleep when he feels something thin and metallic slide between his lips. He chomps down instinctively.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Clef whispers, “Ben-”

“Nnn?”

“Under your tongue.”

It takes a second for the words to register. His body is faintly achey, his head pounds. Everything is slightly nullified with exhaustion. But he hears it, and maneuvers the instrument around in his mouth absently.

“Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“If only we had some sort of alternative instrument,” he groans softly.

“Oh, shut it.”


	4. this was in my google drive titled 'blowjob scene' [Draven/James] [NSFW]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this was gonna be part of a collab between Leamas, V1als and i but we never got around to finishing it so heres this

The last night they spend together they don’t have sex; they simply share the space, the light, the room, the bed. James turns off his lamp first and is asleep long before Draven is, and by the time he sets aside _Carrie_ it’s nearly midnight and as he sits in their bed with one hand on the button to turn off the lamp he can look over the outline of his partner with complete certainty and know that there is James, _his_ James, curled comfortable up on his side with his mouth slightly open and his thick, round glasses folded up on the nightstand next to a copy of the complete works of Hume.

When they will find James- as he will be told- they will find him on the cold, concrete floor of some god forsaken place, and he will be in a similar position with his hand clamped around the impalement wound on his stomach. James’ left arm is tucked under his head, the last time Draven sees him, and when they find him they will never find his left arm at all. James is all in one place here where Draven can turn off the lamp and kiss his forehead and let his nose linger just a second too long in James’ hair and when they find James, James will be in many parts and pieces, because James is the center of everything that happens to James is the center of everything that happens to James is the center of everything that happens to James is the center of everything that happens to James is the center of everything that happens to James is the center of everything that happens to James is the center of everything that happens to James undoes his zipper one cool February evening and Draven groans playfully in the soft light as he kneels for James, the center of everything that happens to him.

 

“Oh, Dr. Talloran,” he coos, unclipping the collarbone clip on his kevlar task force vest and undoing the clasps on James’ belt in a similar fashion, “Tell me about the nature of reality.”

 

“I don’t have my doctorate yet, you know,” quips James in response, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Flirting isn’t sexy if it’s incorrect.”

 

“Okay, fine,” says Draven, fumbling now with James’ underwear. “ _Researcher_ Talloran. Your thoughts on reality?”

 

“Well,” says James, curling one hand and all five fingers (on the same hand blood all in his body all in one place all together in a living breathing being called James who is not in danger and is the center of everything that happens to him) through Draven’s dark curls. “It’s a bit complicated. I’d hate to ruin your mood.”

 

“You’re terrible at foreplay,” Draven reaches up and runs his hands over James’ hips. “Tell me again?”

 

“Reality,” James says, moving his fingers down over Draven’s ears from his hair, tracing his jawline, “Is all in the eyes of the perceiver. That is, until it’s--” His partner lets out a short, shuddering breath of pleasure. Draven looks up at him with a raised eyebrow as he recomposes himself. “--You--you have to give me a _warning,_ for fuck’s sake!”

 

“A warning?” Replies Draven. “Attention, everyone, this is your Director speaking--”

 

“-- _Draven_ \--”

 

“--Just a fair warning, I’m about to give this man’s dick the sucking of a lifetime--”

 

“--And you say _I’m_ bad at foreplay--”

 

“--as soon as we enter lockdown. Just to repeat, I’m going to _completely fuck the brains out of this man,_ Researcher Talloran do you copy?”

 

_“Copy that, Alpha Red.” Says the man on the radio in the wreckage. “We found a body down here--”_

 

“For fuck’s sake, Draven, it’s not that _hard--_ ”

 

_“--to use the teeth to identify.” Says the medic, checking boxes off a chart with bits of flesh on her boots--_

 

“--Damn right, it’s not. Should do something about that,” muses Draven. “Do you copy?”

 

_“Copy that. We think we got all the pieces--”_

 

James lets out an exasperated sigh, smiling. “...Yeah, yeah. I copy.”

 

_“--We’re bringing him up now, but it’s not going to be pretty.”_

 

Draven thought James always looked beautiful when his back arched and he--

 

_“--Broke the spine, just fell apart during the autopsy--”_

 

“I love you,” says Draven, breathing fast. “I--”

 

_“--can’t believe we didn’t find it sooner, it was there all along--”_

 

“--love you,” says Draven softly as his partner sleeps on his side the last night they share a bed with his left arm tucked under his head and his glasses on the bedside table. James Talloran can’t hear him.

 

James Talloran will not be able to hear him for much longer.


	5. A Hunt [GOC Clef]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quick. Focused. Effective.
> 
> This was supposed to be part of a bigger thing, but since I left SCP I've got more finished scenes sitting around to sift through. I'll post the better ones here, I think.

_Luzerne, Iowa_

_1985_

 

It was a suburb from the time before ‘suburb’ meant ‘box neighborhood’. Houses of different shapes and accents, aging trees warping sidewalks, faded Fisher Price playsets collecting puddles in patchy backyards. There was one gas station and a grocery store three generations old sitting on the same street. A single lutheran church with faded white siding brought in a congregation of roughly twelve each sunday, and between sundays the small amount of children residing there were bussed to a school fifteen minutes away. It was an oasis of trees in a mind numbing sea of corn, field after field, so much that the squares of farmland shaped the landscape into uniform gravel-lined intersections. It was a checkpoint in a maze forty miles from the nearest major highway. If you were going to kill someone, it would be easy. If you were going to kill someone, all you had to do was be an outsider, and you could damn well kill them in broad daylight so long as you were quick.

And the man in the tan station wagon knew how to be quick.

He sat in the driver’s seat across the street from where the two girls were playing and smoked without bothering to clear the ash. The house was two stories tall, and needed a new coat of paint- a new coat of everything, actually- and in the unfenced side yard (who needed fences in a town of 63?) there was a rusting iron swing set that squeaked loudly in the stagnant summer air. The man watched with his head leaned back against the headrest. The twins were 8 years old, two little girls in overalls and dusty light-up sneakers; because he hadn’t slept in three days, he didn’t bother to learn their names. It wouldn’t matter in a few minutes who they were. It only mattered what they could do.

He was hunting alone. The rest of his team was on sabbatical following something a botched mission he only half-remembered, but he’d chosen to pass on taking the break offered by medical. He was fine, he could handle himself,

(most of the time)

and he considered himself decent at working solo. _Quick, focused, effective_ ; he repeated that to himself. He was tired- he could feel that he was pushing it pulling hunts back to back like this- but once he started the adrenaline would come, and he wouldn’t feel tired at all. He’d be able to make the upcoming four hour drive to headquarters easy if he focused. He’d be able to do this if he focused. He needed to focus.

He was not afraid. And he was focused. Quick, focused, effective; he was not afraid. _I am a machine._

The parents were away. The twins were in the yard. There were trash bags in the back. He would put them in the backseat, then stop for a while and put them in the trunk, and then he would drive to headquarters and the morgue team would take them. And he’d get paid. And he’d sleep in the barracks.

Quick. Focused. Effective. He wouldn’t even remember this. He didn’t even know their names.

The man looked behind the car. The street was lined all the way down with houses, but he didn’t see anyone out and about who might hear, although that might quickly change if someone heard a shotgun blast. The station wagon was facing the other direction, the direction that opened back into the endless maze of gravel roads. Four movements: one to the adjacent sidewalk, two shots, one back to the car- oh, could he carry two bodies at once? He decided he’d have to. He’d open the back passenger door beforehand. If he just popped the trunk he might not even have to stop, he could just start the drive right away.

Yes. That would be good. The fewer stops the better.

The man slowed his breathing. His shotgun was only five years old, but per field tradition he had a small tally mark etched along the wood panelling for every person he’d killed. Morbid? Maybe; but was it such a crime to take pride in your work, whatever it was? He’d seen a few older agents with their guns covered in tallies. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel if he ever got to that point, but in this moment running his thumb and index finger over the little brittle scratches was reassuring. He would not be killed; he had not been killed before, and he would not be killed this time. He would not allow himself to be killed.

One of the girls had her hair braided. The other girl didn’t. The fact that they were both greens made this uniquely difficult, he thought, because he would have to kill them one at a time. If the other saw, he’d be forced into a fight he knew he couldn’t win. So he would have to take both of them at once. Maybe with one shot. That would be the best case scenario, taking them both with one shotgun blast, but he’d have to be lucky as hell.

Quick. Focused. Effective. He had ten minutes. The girls were still on the swingset not twelve feet from him. Like a predator growing a stride to a working gallop, his heart beat faster, and just as he expected he was no longer tired.

Agent Ukulele stepped out of the car.

 

 

 


	6. Bahir [major tom universe thing]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bright family ghost story. This is...really unfinished, but I liked what I had and was reminded of it on tumblr earlier today, so here's what I have. If nothing else, it conceptualizes some more lore.

Bright family ghost story:

When Adam Bright— Jack Bright’s father — was fifteen, _his_ father — Jack’s Grandfather, Nathaniel Bahir — was held hostage and murdered in the 05 Council room, situated at the time in a bunker on the outskirts of London. Jack would find in adulthood that the formal accounts of the 1948 Chaos Insurgency coup d'etat actually _didn’t_ feature several details that had been recounted to him by his father, including the claim that Bahir had had his foot sawed off in an attempt to extract the location of some obscure religious artifact (exactly what religion Adam had been getting at was never really clear), the claim that Bahir had drunk his own piss to survive (he was only held captive for 6 hours), and the claim that Bahir had had affairs with not one, not two, but _three_ of the Insurgency agents holding him hostage, including with the man who would pull the trigger (although no records of the relationships existed in Foundation archives, Jack would remain haunted by the visage of a secret undiscovered Bright family Chaos Insurgency linage, the possibility of which he regarded as one of many true lasting terrors of the story).

Adam had been attending a London boarding school at the time. He would describe to his children, on dark and stormy Nebraska nights, being bundled away. Being shaken awake and taken to an unmarked black car by one of his father’s aides. Being shoved on a plane to New York. He described the kind of Foundation horror the Bright children would come to know well: asking for answers, and getting none. Asking if his father was alive, and not knowing. Being hustled along. Being moved as an afterthought. What was the Bright family word, that word referring to a child whose parents ‘died in the dark’, as they say? _Foundling_?

One of the earliest Foundling experiences, then. The coup d'etat. The fracturing. His father wasn’t one to express many feelings about his siblings, but he always got the sense that he was unsettled by the reality of what had transpired at the bunker that day: Bahir, who held the traditional Bright family 05-6 seat, had had four sons within a wide age range, two of which had held the 05-7 and 05-8 seats respectively. Edward Lumineux was his oldest son, held the 05-7 seat, and was someone Adam described to Jack as the closest to their father and the most alike to him in personality: commanding, succinct, and headstrong. He and Bahir had shared an apartment in north London, and the two of them were together in the bunker at the time of the first raids.

From examination of the scene afterwards, it was gathered that Bahir had watched Lumineux bleed out. Had seen him shot. Had watched him slump down against one of the flecked grey walls of the meeting room. How many hours had passed with the body laying there, still and pale, was dubious, and Jack had always wondered if his grandfather had felt anything; if he had been heartbroken with the identity of his captors; if he had tried to comfort his 25-year-old son in his final moments; if he had wondered about Adam; if he had worried over the fate of the Foundation; if he was afraid. It seemed to him at times that his father hadn’t been close enough with Bahir to be able to give an idea of what he might have felt in his final hours.

But that wasn’t the ghost story. And it wasn’t what had left Jack and Mikell, the oldest and somehow the most easily enraptured by this tale, lying awake at night.

 

Bright family ghost story:

 

From the New York City airport, Adam was forced into another unmarked car and driven to Nebraska.

His mother, Virginia Bahir, lived in a large three-story house in the country. The house was his father’s, and the Bahirs _did_ have a certain amount of money at the time; it had been acquired, like the house, through rather shadowy means, but there was money nonetheless. His brother Jason had met him there under similar circumstances, having been all but kidnapped from a youth hostel in Quebec before arriving two days before. Virginia, in true Bright family fashion, was an eccentric woman with rather opaque Foundation connections, and although she seemed to have some degree of understanding of recent events, she very openly opted not to tell them.

And so, they waited. Foundling fears. Death in the dark. Quiet days, months, until the winter came.

Until one night in January Joseph Argent staggered up the drive, stumbled onto the porch, and did not knock but rather slammed his fist onto the front door with enough force to knock several of their mother’s tchotchkes from a nearby windowsill. He was yelling, no, _screaming;_ Adam hadn’t recognized him when he’s stumbled out from

 

 

05-8, Joseph Argent, was someone that Jack had met only once.

Joseph Argent and Edward Lumineux

 

 

 

 

 

Saying: _Rest now, my son._


End file.
